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Category Archives: Scholarly Communications

An article in Nature today on attempts to standardize impact factors across academic disciplnes today – a brief quote from the article states:

Performance metrics based on values such as citation rates are heavily biased by field, so most measurement experts shy away from interdisciplinary comparisons. The average biochemist, for example, will always score more highly than the average mathematician, because biochemistry attracts more citations. But researchers at Indiana University Bloomington think that they have worked out the best way of correcting this disciplinary bias. And they are publishing their scores online, for the first time letting academics compare rankings across all fields.

A recent scientific sting operration of sorts was carried out by John Bohannon wherein he faked a sciectific article along with some collaborators from Harvard and submitted a number of “pay to publish” open access journals – the results were as he described “worse than he expected”. University of Colorado -Denver Librarian Jeffrey Beal has been warning about these predatory publishers for some time now and keeps a list of to assist in avoiding them. Read more here from NPR.

The Scholarly Kitchen Blog did an interview of Roy Kaufman, Director of New Ventures, for the Copyright Clearance Center. I will let you come to your own conclusions but I will just say the comments to the article were more interesting to me than the interview – most troubling it looks like the CCC is going to try to insert itself into the K-12 Common Core standards – (Hey we’re not making enough money off higher ed – let’s exploit the kiddos too!).